recycled materials

While many Muslims don’t drink alcohol, the people of Batroun, Lebanon love their beer. At least according to Jamil al-Haddad, the visionary behind Colonel beer and a new microbrewery built out of recycled materials.

There are roughly 150,000 stray cats and dogs in Istanbul alone, and with so many other problems to deal with, city officials aren’t likely to make them priority. One Turksih company came up with a brilliant solution to feed some animals and recycle plastic at the same time.

If you live in the Middle East, surely you are accustomed to seeing plastic bottles lining city streets and even far-flung desert areas. While a tiny fraction of these might be recycled in some countries, most of them will languish for years in informal and formal landfills.

As part of an effort to rescue certain Israeli cities from urban decay, the Ayalim Association has built a series of ‘student villages’ throughout the country. The latest in the hard-scrabble city of Lod, not far from Israel’s interntional airport, has been constructed out of recycled shipping containers, and will be inaugurated on 8 July, 2014.

Rubber tires are pure nastiness, especially when they’re no longer useful for cars. They languish in landfills, provide habitat for mosquitoes and rats, and often cause horrendous fires – like this one in Kuwait that was visible from space. Hit the jump to find out how Hala Smadi is putting them to good (re)use in Jordan.

German artist HA Schult has spent the last 18 years traveling around the world with his own army of ‘trash people.’ Like a modern version of China’s terra-cotta warriors, the exhibit recently landed in Israel.

Anyone who hasn’t been to Syria in the last few years can’t possibly grasp the full extent of the horrors Syrians have endured, but we do know it has been unspeakably hard. To take the edge off, a handful of artists in Damascus built what the Guinness Book of Records recently confirmed is the world’s […]

The nearly 10,000 Palestinian refugees packed into southern Beirut’s Shatila camp live in makeshift homes of corrugated tin, and many long to return to their homeland. In order to depict life in the camp, artist Abdulrahman Katanani used the only materials he had available to him – scraps.

The current road linking Abu Dhabi and Dubai, E111 is said to be one of the most dangerous, which killed roughly 9 out of 100,000 people in 2012, but the new state of the art E311 highway will be one of the world’s greenest.

So many countries in the Middle East and North Africa rely way too much on concrete for their building needs, but Libya Design bucks the trend with Doshma – a new creative hub built in part with a used shipping container.

When Israeli soldiers killed her son Bassem in 2009, Sabiha Abu Rahman faced the impossible task of being alive without him. She has since turned her grief into balm with a beautiful garden full of repurposed tear gas grenades.

HUSH is a brilliant seating pod designed by Freyja Sewell that creates a small tucked away spot anywhere – even in the most crowded cities. A Brighton designer who finished her studies at Nagoya University in Japan, Sewell knows what it’s like to crave a quiet space that makes her feel comforted and safe.

Design is an often overlooked aspect of any social protest movement, but the organic nature of its occurrence is of great interest to the Turkish collective Herkes İçin Mimarlık. Translated as Architecture for All, this group collected photos of shelters built from scrap materials during Turkey’s recent uprising and then made drawings of them.

When news of a $10 bicycle made of recycled cardboard first reached our desk, we didn’t think it would ever see the light of day, but in two days, Cardboard Technologies has already raised a whopping $16,070 on its Indiegogo campaign to mass produce what Popular Science Magazine called one of the best inventions of 2013.

We were so excited to learn that an Israeli pair transformed an old bus into an attractive luxury home, until we saw what materials they used. Looking for an opportunity to make some money, Tally Saul and Hagit Morevski used such carbon-intensive and toxic materials as cement, concrete and formica to complete their ungreen conversion.

When “Biggest Loser” coach Orly Hoffman Bar approached Toledo-Lifschitz Architecture & Design with an idea to convert a vacant space north of Tel Aviv into a sweet new gym, she offered two major constraints: time and money.

Every three years, the Aga Khan Architecture Award acknowledges projects relevant to Islam that are culturally, environmentally and socially superior. Accompanied by a generous $1 million prize, it is among the world’s most prestigious architecture awards. Apartment #1 by Tehran’s Architecture by Collective Terrain is one of 20 projects nominated, and though it faces stiff […]

If we only listened to mainstream media, we would know Beirut as a city full of bullet holes, terrorists and Syrian refugees – all of which are unfortunate realities in the densely populated capital of Lebanon, which borders both Israel and Syria. But it is also home to some of the world’s most interesting artists, designers, […]

Images of Tadashi Kawamata’s extraordinary installation entitled Chairs for Abu Dhabi has been circulating the blogosphere the last few days. A follow up of a similar project featured in France, the piece consists of hundreds of chairs – mostly vintage and recycled – stacked on top of one another like a giant hollow mountain of […]

Despite the many stereotypes about residents of Gulf countries, many people prefer creative, sustainable boutiques to shopping in big glitzy malls, though their options are typically fairly limited. Which might explain why Bahrain’s Market 338 has become such a popular destination. Inaugurated by Al Riwaq Art Space, the temporary souq in Manama’s Adliya district started with […]

Nobody wants to see rubbish littering the magical Sahara desert, unless of course it belongs to WE MAKE CARPETS. The Dutch collective has been arranging ordinary household objects into dazzling carpets for a few years now, but their most recent installation commissioned by the Taragalte Festival in southern Morocco is among their finest. Made entirely out […]

Concerned to reconnect hands and minds and make a worthwhile environmental impact, a few women from Saudi Arabia are crocheting recycled plastic bags into colorful bean bags and other quality crafts. The founder of Ateeq, which is Arabic for vintage, Diane Rayyan teamed up with crochet master Ishrat Khawja to hold a two day “trocheting” […]